es a red hat, talkin' just as if he was back on the farm, up north of
London. I don't blame Rufus Rastus for wearin' his eyes on the outside.
They stuck out like the waist-buttons on a Broadway cop, and he hardly
knew whether he was waitin' on table, or makin' up a berth.

With his second glass of fizz Sir Peter began to thaw a little. He
hadn't paid much attention to me for a while, passin' most of his
remarks over to Mr. Gordon; but all of a sudden he comes at me with:

"You're a Home Ruler, I expect?"

"Sure," says I. "Now, spring the gag."

But if there was a stinger to it, he must have lost it in the shuffle;
for he opens up a line of talk that I didn't have the key to at all. Mr.
Gordon tells me afterwards it was English politics and that Sir Peter
was tryin' to register me as a Conservative. Anyway, I've promised to
vote for Balfour, or somebody like that next election; so I'm goin' to
send word to Little Tim that he needn't come around. Had to do it, just
to please the old gent. By the time we'd got to the little cups of black
he'd switched to something else.

"I don't suppose you know anything about railroads?" says he to Mr.
Gordon.

Then it was my grin. Railroads is what Pyramid plays with, you know.
He's a director on three or four lines himself, and is always lookin'
for more. It's about as safe to leave a branch road out after nightfall
when Gordon's around as it would be to try to raise watermelons in
Minetta Lane. He grinned, too, and said something about not knowing as
much about 'em as he did once.

With that Sir Peter lights up one of Mr. Gordon's Key West night-sticks
and cuts adrift on the railroad business. That made the boss kind of
sick at first. Railroads was something he was tryin' to forget for the
evenin'. But there wasn't any shuttin' the old jay off. And say! he knew
the case-cards all right. There was too much high finance about it for
me to follow close; but anyways I seen that it made Mr. Gordon sit up
and take notice. He'd peg in a question now and then, and got the old
one so stirred up that after a while he shed the bucket, lugged out one
of his bags, and flashed a lot of papers done up in neat little piles.
He said it was a report he was goin' to make to some board or other, if
ever the decimals would quit bothering him long enough.

Well, that sort of thing might keep Mr. Gordon awake, but not for mine.
Half-way to Baltimore I turns in, leaving 'em at it. I had a good
snooz